One of the greatest exponents of Spanish
painting, the artist Diego Velazquez was a court painter to King Philip
IV during the period of the Spanish
Baroque. Although a master of history
painting and genre-painting
(bodegones), he is renowned for his portrait
art - completing over 20 portraits of the King along with others of
the Royal Family and their friends. His best known works include his masterpieces
Portrait of Pope Innocent X (c.1650, Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome)
Las Meninas (1656,
Prado, Madrid), The Tapestry Weavers (Las Hilanderas) (1659, Prado),
the Equestrian Portrait of Duke de Olivares (1634, Prado) and The
Rokeby Venus (1647-51, National Gallery, London). Rising above
other Spanish
Baroque Artists like Jusepe Ribera
(1591-1652) and Zurbaran (1598-1664),
he is regarded along with El Greco (1541-1614)
and Goya as being among the greatest Old
Masters of Spain.

Born in Seville in 1599 to a Portuguese
family, little is known of his early life. It is believed he initially
studied fine art painting and drawing
under the artist Francisco de Herrera the Elder but unable to bear his
temper tantrums, he shortly went to apprentice under the artist Francisco
Pacheco instead. Although Pacheco was a less accomplished artist, he was
more tolerant and better connected in society.

Velazquez married Pachecos daughter
just before he turned 19. His works showed an acute understanding of realism.
His early pictures and sketches are mainly studies of still
life as he strove to discover his own style. Important works from
this time include, The
Waterseller of Seville (c.1618, Wellington Museum, London), Christ
in the House of Martha and Mary (National Gallery, London), Peasants'
Dinner (c.1618, Szepmuveseti Muzeum, Budapest), Kitchen Maid with
the Supper at Emmaus (c.1618, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin),
The Adoration of the Magi (1619, Prado, Madrid), St. Idelfonso
Receiving the Chasuble from the Virgin (c.1620, Museo de Bellas Artes,
Seville).

Court Painter

In 1622 he moved his family to Madrid,
and became court painter to King Philip IV. The regular salary gave him
the freedom to pursue his passion for portraiture, as unsalaried artists
were reliant on (mainly religious) public commissions for a living. Portraits
remained the chief part of his workload for 20 years. One of his enemies
was to say 'he only knows how to paint heads'. To which the artist replied,
they pay me a great compliment, for I know of no one else who can
do as much'.

In 1627 Philip launched a competition for
the Best Painter in Spain, which Velazquez won. Unfortunately the picture
was destroyed in a fire at the palace in 1734. In 1629 he took his first
trip to Italy to study the High
Renaissance artists, and although there are no records about whom
he met or what he saw, he came back with a new vigour. On his return he
painted the first of many portraits of the young prince Don Balthasar
Carlos. Unlike other traditional artists, Velazquez painted his subject
devoid of pomp and ceremony. He painted several equestrian portraits of
the King, and the sculptor Montanes modelled a statue on one of these
portraits (the painting no longer exists). The sculpture was cast in bronze
by the Florentine sculptor Pietro Tacca and now stands in the Plaza de
Oriente at Madrid.

At this point in time, Velazquez met the
Flemish artist Rubens, who had come on a mission
to the King of Spain. Velazquez was so inspired by this meeting with one
of the acknowledged giants of Baroque painting, that he set off again
for a study trip to Naples and other cities in Italy. For more, please
see: Painting in Naples
(1600-1700). On his return he executed two large paintings, Joseph's
Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob (1630, Patrimonio Nacional, Monasterio
de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Madrid), and the Forge of Vulcan
(1630, Prado Madrid). Other paintings from this period include Apolo en
la Fragua de Vulcano, 1630 (Prado), The Lady with a Fan (c.1638,
The Wallace Collection, London) and the Equestrian Portrait of Duke
de Olivares, 1634 (Prado).

Las Meninas

In his final years - when acclaimed as
one of the most famous painters in Spain - he produced two of his best
Baroque paintings, demonstrating a bright and fluid use of colour.
The first is the group portrait of the Royal Family children including
the Infanta Margarita and the sickly Prince Felipe Prospero. Las Meninas
(1656, Prado, Museum), shows several figures in a large room in the Spanish
court of King Philip. The young Infanta Margarita is surrounded by a group
of ladies in waiting, bodyguards, dwarfs and a dog. Just behind them,
in a mirror, you can see the King and Queen, and the artist portrays himself
painting a canvas. The use of mirror reflection echoes the Arnolfini
Portrait, 1483 by Jan van Eyck.
There is an elusiveness to the work that suggests art and life are an
illusion. Because of its complexities, it is one of the most analyzed
works in Western art. The second masterpiece of his last years is The
Tapestry Weavers (Las Hilanderas) (1659, Prado).

Stricken with a sudden fever, Velazquez
died in 1660 and was buried in the Fuensalida vault of the church of San
Juan Bautista. His wife died within a few days of the funeral and was
buried alongside him. Unfortunately the church was destroyed by the French
in 1811 and the location of his grave is no longer known.

Legacy

Until the 19th century his works were not
very well known outside of Spain where he was an influence on painters
like Zurbaran and Bartolome Esteban
Murillo, as well as the Neapolitan
School of Painting (c.1600-56) and the Neapolitan Baroque (c.1656-1700).
He is often quoted as a key influence on the artist Edouard Manet who
called him the painters of painters. His vivid brushstrokes
were supposed to have inspired the 19th century painter Edouard Manet
to bridge the gap between Realism and Impressionism. Future artists such
as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Francis
Bacon also found inspiration in his works.

In the early years of the 17th century
the realism which for two centuries had been latent in Spanish painting
found a robust expression in the work of Jusepe Ribera (1591-1652) and
Francisco Herrera the Elder (1590-1654). Both consulted actual appearances
most strenuously, but both inclined to reduce the infinite variety of
appearances to a kind of monotonous formulization. It remained for Diego
Velazquez to fulfill and perfect the syle of Spanish realism by a consummately
fine observation and by an amazing ingenuity in organizing his tints and
hues so that they became equivalents of what he saw and felt in nature.
To reach this perfection required nearly twenty years of constant study
and experimentation. It was a course possible only for a painter under
favourable circumstances, and it seems that Velazquez's lifelong service
as a court painter, which has often been deplored as a servitude, really
provided the conditions which were essential to the flowering of his art.
He was to suffer distractions and interruptions from his duties as a chamberlain,
but his livelihood never was in question. In Philip IV he had a patron
who let him paint in his own way. One doubts if Velazquez's art
could have developed under any private patronage that Spain then afforded.

Early Life and Artistic Training

Diego Velazquez was born in Seville, in
1599, his father being of Portuguese and gentle extraction, his mother
of patrician stock from Seville. At thirteen he was taken from the Latin
school and placed with Francisco de Herrera. Within a year Herrera's notoriously
brutal manners had become unbearable, and the fourteen-year-old boy was
articled for five years on very onerous terms to the cultured and friendly
painter, Francisco Pacheco (1564-1644). No very definite influence of
Herrera appears in Velazquez's early works. Indeed the fury of Herrera's
workmanship, his combing and streaking heavy loadings of pigment about,
must have been distasteful to a pupil who from the first sought refinement
and reticence. Yet it is likely that on broader lines the 12 months or
so with Herrera was fruitful. He was the only painter then working in
Spain who knew that colour
pigments may and should be convertible into coloured light; that modeling
is merely the registration of the significant degrees of light reflected
to the eye from the form under observation. The task of Velazquez was
merely to pursue this principle to its ultimate and exquisite consequences.

It was a task for which Francisco Pacheco could offer little help to the
young Velazquez. He was, on the whole, a well-meaning and kindly pedant,
with the saving grace of a lively curiosity as to the art of the present.
He adored the High Renaissance
style and tried to follow it. Eventually he wrote a treatise on the art
of painting, Arte de la Pintura, in which, with much good advice
to young painters, he embodied the gist of the more important artist lives
of Vasari, adding on his own account such information as he could gather
concerning contemporary Spanish painters. More importantly, Pacheco had
the acquaintance and good will of the art-loving intelligentsia of Seville.
To be his apprentice was after all an admirable training for a youth who
was to become a court painter. The dignified and serious pupil readily
won the master's favour and, just short of nineteen, Diego Velazquez married
Pacheco's daughter. Juana. It is the last that we hear of her, but in
the marital relations of artists no news may be presumed to be good news.

Paintings During His Early Career As
a Seville Painter

Of the score or so of pictures that have
come down to us from Velazquez's early years in Seville, none show any
trace of the prevailing Italian Renaissance
art favoured by his father-in-law. All are soundly Spanish. It appears
then that Pacheco had the good sense to let his talented young apprentice
and son-in-law alone. In his later writings he deprecates in principle
the painting of bodegons as an inferior branch of art, but approves them
when they are as well painted as those of his son-in-law. They show the
future great painter more plainly than the few pieces of religious
art and portraiture of this early period, but before considering the
bodegons, a word on the other pictures. In such religious pictures as
the Assumption and St. John on Patmos, Frere Collection,
London; the Epiphany, Madrid; the Investiture of St. Ildefonso,
(St. Idelfonso Receiving the Chasuble from the Virgin, 1620, Museo de
Bellas Artes, Seville), nothing is very remarkable except the tenacity
of the modeling in harsh contrasts of light and dark, and the Spanish
types. We have the work of a very strenuous young painter coping with
the difficulties of construction and character, acquiring his fundamentals.
He hardly knows what to do with these hard-won elements, compiles them
rather casually into pictures which in their metallic protuberances give
an unpleasant sense of effort. But there is progress towards unity. The
Supper at Emmaus, New York, is really a transfigured bodegon, has
dignity, a cool harmony of silvery colour, while the swing of the figures
of the disciples, and the outstretched, foreshortened arm of the nearer
one, give a fine sense of space, which is enhanced by the transparent
greys of the prevailing tone. The modeling of the face and the shoulder
of Jesus is strong and sensitive.

The very detailed account of such features as the drapery and the tablecloth
is singularly large in feeling. On the religious side, Jesus is merely
serious and affable, the disciples merely astounded. The reading is adequate,
not penetrating. It is, to repeat, a sort of glorified bodegon, as if,
to the amazement of the honest frequenters of the tavern, a devout and
dignified wayfarer were to say an unexpected grace.

The Investiture of St. Ildefonso has evoked little admiration,
yet one admires the asceticism of the saint who maintains before a miracle
in his favour a gentleman's imperturbability. I like, too, the practical
sense shown in bringing the baroque cloudland peopled by Sevillian girls
down to a level which makes the Virgin really bestow the vestment on the
saint. A sort of housewifely carefulness with which she performs her office
is most happily expressed, and is altogether entrancing. When one recalls
the scores of operatically conceived St. Ildefonsos, the rigorous prose
of Velazquez's reading of the theme will seem, not merely very Spanish,
but very distinguished.

Of the three or four Baroque
portraits from the Sevillian years, far the finest is that of the
poet Gongora, at Boston. It is modeled up in neutral tints with great
energy and with a fine sense of the larger forms of the hatchet-faced
head. It has heavy passages - the unmodulated shadow of the farther side
of the face, the unsatisfactory placing of the shadowed eye, the hard
further contour which interrupts the rounding in space. With all these
signs of inexperience, it conveys the somewhat vain and aggressive character
of the self-conscious stylist and fashionable poet; is for a painter of
twenty-three an extraordinarily competent and promising performance.

But it is in the bodegons that the future master most plainly declares
himself. Of these tavern or kitchen pictures there are, according to the
authority you consult, a dozen, more or less. With a single exception
(The Water Carrier, 1620, Wellington Museum, London), these are
all half-length character studies in oblongs, after the fashion set by
Caravaggio and his followers. The Caravaggian
tavern pieces, however, are in feeling a world apart from those of Velazquez.
Where Caravaggism rested
its appeal on sensational human relations - generally on something strange,
sinister, overtly picturesque in the action represented - Velazquez dispenses
with action altogether, or merely emphasizes the dignity of habitual and
routine relations.

The few bodegons in which he seeks animation or drama - the Musicians,
Berlin; the Old Fruit Woman, Oslo - are the poor bodegons. While
the Caravaggians stood on the dramatic appeal of some odd event happening
in the place, Velazquez stands on the worth and interest of the place
itself, and of those persons who normally frequent it.

What may be Velazquez's earliest bodegon is also one of the finest - Kitchen
Maid with the Supper at Emmaus (c.1618, National Gallery of Ireland,
Dublin). A good replica is at Chicago. The sturdy figure of the girl,
fore-shortened as she leans over the table, dominates the long oblong.
The curves of her face and white headdress are repeated along the bottom
of the canvas by a fine assortment of kitchen bowls and pots; mostly in
glazed pottery; one piece, copper. There is a suggestion of a tidy little
world, of permanence and dignity. The posture of the girl preparing for
her work is very grand. Velazquez has anticipated Millet in asserting
the monumental character of the commonest useful actions. The modeling,
through light, is at once very emphatic and tender. As in all his early
works, the figure is pushed forward to the picture plane, but shows no
tendency to transgress its bounds. There are empty or ambiguous areas
at the upper corners, but they hardly impair the effect. The full lights
on the head and sleeve of the figure, and on the kitchen gear, are most
subtly modulated - no repetition, no wide intervals. For the work of an
eighteen-year-old youth, this picture is amazingly complete and skillful.

The grandest of the bodegons seems to be not the famous Water Carrier,
El Aguador - superb as that great picture is - but rather Peasants'
Dinner (c.1618, Szepmuveseti Muzeum, Budapest). Though the figures
and still life crowd the oblong frame, there is a sense of ample space.
That is achieved by various means, the swing in and out of the figures,
the foreshortening of the
table, the carefully observed distances between the four rows of kitchen
utensils on the table, but even more by the translucency of the all-enveloping
atmosphere. The composition is very interesting. The roughly crumpled
napkin is the central accent. Its mobile lights are physically exciting.
All other lights are kept smooth and globular and tranquilizing. The heavier
off-centre weight and mass of the two men is oddly but effectively balanced
by the greater number of lighter forms on the tablc to the left, and by
the prominence given to the table top. The whole arrangement shows a sensitive
regard for linear composition, which will soon yield to other interests.
Again, in the grandeur discovered rather than imputed in these habitual
postures and everyday acts, lies much of the greatness of the picture.

We may recall in passing that the mood is Spanish. In Spain a workman
is still hailed as caballero, knight. Other painters of bodegons shared
this mood. None expressed it with the integrity and finesse of young Velazquez.

For some five years, with Pacheco's influence
behind him, Velazquez seems to have practiced independently at Seville,
painting more tavern pieces (bodegons), and religious pictures, than portraits.
In 1621 Philip IV came to the throne, called Count Olivares, a notable
patron of poets and painters from Seville, to be prime minister. Scenting
opportunity, Velazquez and Pacheco hastened to Madrid, without success.
Two years later, in 1623, Velazquez repeated the visit, and through the
kindness of Olivares got a sitting from the king. The resulting equestrian
portrait was early destroyed, but it must have been satisfactory, for
Velazquez was appointed court painter and, at twenty-four, assured of
an adequate and permanent livelihood.

It might reasonably be argued that Velazquez's first six years as a court
painter mark a retrogression in his oil
painting. Certainly nothing made in this period is as pictorially
accomplished as the best of the bodegons. These were years of re-education
chiefly in the elements of construction. In the rich galleries assembled
by Philip II at the Escorial and Madrid, Velazquez had before him masterpieces
of Titian and El Greco. At the moment, they helped
him little, if at all. Both predecessors indulged conventions of picture-making
which were alien to his spirit. As for himself, he wished to approach
natural appearances as much as possible without preconceptions, wanted
the picture to grow out of the observation itself. It was an unprecedented
quest in which he had to find his own way. Luckily, handsomely supported
by salaries as a court painter and minor chamberlain, he could take his
time without worry. And he was positively encouraged by frequent visits
from the young king to the basement studio in the old palace.

The new manner is admirably illustrated in the standing portraits of Philip
IV and of Olivares, at New York, both painted in 1624. As pictures, both
portraits, with all their impressiveness as readings of character, have
an unpleasant stiffness and coldness. The forms seem rather casually set
in the frame and tend to break through the picture plane. The merely silhouetted
legs give an inadequate sense of support. There are dead areas in the
expanse of black costume, and the accessories, just a table or a chest,
are of little compositional value.

But these apparent defects are the result of calculation, not negligence.
In observing the forms, Velazquez resolutely focuses on the faces and
hands, which he models up with the utmost care. When the eye focuses on
such points, the mass and projection of the whole figure is only vaguely
seen and apprehended. He will paint the body and legs only as he sees
them when he is looking intently at the face. It is easy to say that by
waiving this principle of focus and optical centre of interest, and painting
the figure not as he saw it, but as he knew it to be, Velazquez could
have made more attractive pictures of the king and Olivares, but he could
have done so only on condition of abandoning that long quest which was
to lead to his most personal and beautiful discoveries.

As modeling in light and dark, in careful gradations of tone, these portraits
mark an advance over the heads in the bodegons. The modeling shadow is
lighter and more transparent; nothing is lost in it. The edges no longer
check the rounding away of the form. But the construction of the entire
picture in modulations of tone is as yet beyond his powers. He comes to
passages where the forms will not detach themselves from the background,
and has to help himself out by arbitrarily whitening the background alongside
the refractory edge. The contours of the Olivares show five or six such
cobbled-up transitions. It is an expedient which Velazquez will employ
for many years before he is able to make the tone tell everything about
form and envelopment. The king and Olivares showed great generosity and
open-mindedness in encouraging a new style which outraged the decorative
and linear conventions of official portraiture in Spain, while lacking
the charm of the popular Venetian manner.

It is a moment of acute self-consciousness for Velazquez, which results
in such disagreeably assertive portraits as the so-called Geographer,
probably rather a court fool, at Rouen, and finds its ablest and most
emphatic expression in the famous and almost equally disagreeable masterpiece,
the Drinkers, (Los Borachos), Madrid.

Meets Rubens - Travels to Italy

Shortly after the painting of Los Borachos the great Peter Paul
Rubens came to Madrid and worked in a studio in the old Alcazar near that
of Velazquez. The younger and older painter, both men of the world, maintained
friendly relations, though there was probably little that either approved
in the other's work. Los Borachos would have shocked Rubens for its chaotic
emphasis. He himself, during his nine months' stay, was mostly copying
the king's Titians. From Rubens, whose decorative formality must have
been distasteful to Velazquez, could be learned only that a plenitude
of form could be expressed with smallest contrasts of blond tints. It
was a lesson which Velazquez was already learning through direct observation
of nature, and I doubt if the example of Rubens' highly stylized sketches
did much to further Velazquez's new endeavor. But the generous and open-minded
Rubens cannot have failed to recognize the prodigious talent of Velazquez,
and also the fact that it needed some central principle of direction.
It is a reasonable guess that Rubens' advice counted for much in Velazquez's
decision to visit Italy in 1629 and 1630.

I think Los Borachos may have been Velazquez's challenge to the
Italian and Italianate painters about the court. Lacking grandeur, grace,
everything to which they gave lip service, Velazquez must have seemed
to them just a journeyman portraitist of an inferior kind. It seems as
if Velazquez may have decided to meet these cavilers on their own ground
in an elaborate composition with many life-sized figures.

Evidently the gusto and vitality of Los Borachos easily put down
the anemic work of the Italianates, and the picture has ever since been
enthusiastically acclaimed. Such praise it well deserves for its power
of construction and characterization, for its superabundant vitality.
Yet a sum of superb parts does not necessarily add up to a fine picture,
and this is far from being a fine picture. One thinks of a more genial
Ribera. Everything to the right is a bodegon motive enhanced and taken
into the open air. In a mock ceremony a drinker, aping Bacchus, places
a wreath upon the head of a kneeling initiate. In this group of unforgettable
heads there is no principle of focus, no point from which the eye must
begin its explorations. The total effect of the group is restless, lumpy
and crowded. The two figures at the left are entirely alien and unassimilated.
The foreshortened torso of the youth at the upper left has a borrowed,
Venetian elegance; the seated figure below, silhouetted in an entirely
unexplained and illogical half-light, again might have come directly from
a Venetian pastoral. The Drinkers makes it clear that, having abandoned
the chiaroscuro construction
of the bodegons, Velasquez at twenty-nine had arrived at no principle
under which he might organize an elaborate composition. It is as if he
felt the need of study that he passed most of his thirtieth and thirty-first
year in Italy.

Velazquez spent most of his time in Italy
in Venice and Rome. Rome had very little to his purpose, for he was far
in advance of the new Caravaggians, while the stately or pompous way of
the Renaissance masters was not his. Venice, on the contrary, offered
much to his purpose. The Venetian compromise between decorative and optical
effect was to dominate his art beneficially for nearly twenty years. Just
from whom he drew the new principle is not easy to say, and does not greatly
matter. From the informal composition and general silvery tone of the
pictures which he painted in Italy, or immediately on his return, I am
inclined to guess that the colourful monumentality of Titian, Tintoretto
and Veronese, attracted him less than the calmer tonality and looser arrangements
of such outlying Venetians as Lorenzo Lotto
(1480-1556), Giovanni Savoldo (active 1506-48) and Moretto da Brescia
(1498-1554). It is these masters that are suggested by the two big pictures
which he painted in Italy, in 1630: Joseph's Bloody Coat Brought to
Jacob (Patrimonio Nacional, Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial,
Madrid), and the Forge of Vulcan (Prado Madrid). In certain expressions
and attitudes they also recall the dramatic mood of Bernardo Strozzi (1581-1644),
who, during Velazquez's stay at Venice, was the leading painter in the
city.

Both pictures must be regarded as study pieces, and as such they mark
a long stride beyond Los Borachos. In Joseph's Coat, the
pictorial focus is sharply established in the two jealous and lying brothers
and in the coat which they hold between them. This involves a veiling
of the figure of Joseph, at the right, in half-light, with a consequent
attenuation of the narrative interest. The glimpse of landscape behind
the group of brothers through the open door is felicitously managed and
gives a liberating effect. The relation of the group of three to the rectangular
aperture which it overlaps is happily felt. Velazquez is beginning to
pay attention to pattern. The conscious effort involved in the composition
betrays itself in the handsome but unfunctional posture of the nearly
nude figure at the left, and in the two uncertainly placed figures in
middle distance who are merely stop-gaps.

As a linear composition the Forge of Vulcan is more thoroughly thought
out. Velazquez has found a function for the postures of the four brawny
semi-nudes, and a sufficient topical motive in the almost irate astonishment
with which Vulcan regards his celestial cousin, Mercury, who breaks the
news of Venus's infidelity. The peasant masquerading as Mercury is inherently
rather silly, but the classically draped form, with the torso and one
arm bare, is at once the necessary counterfoil and echo of the four almost-nude
smiths. The picture is well unified by a cool, silvery tonality, the accessories
are skillfully subordinated, and the play of light and shadow about the
space is handsome.

Mature Paintings

The next fifteen years or so witnessed the completion of all Velazquez's
greatest portrait paintings.
Velazquez's construction is now both sure and various. He can make his
tones say anything he wants, and at all degrees of emphasis and definition.
He knows that a face looks one way under a fixed top light and quite another
way in the diffused light outdoors and, outdoors again, the difference
in appearance between the face of a sitter at rest or riding a galloping
horse. He studies most assiduously the relations of tones in the ensemble,
attaining unprecedented refinements in their adjustment. This adjustment
is still somewhat artificial, in the Venetian manner. In as fully achieved
a masterpiece as the Surrender at Breda, one figure receives the
light from in front and a neighbouring figure is seen dark against light
coming from behind. Velazquez, like the great Venetians, as yet uses the
light as a resource of stage managership, as an arbitrary means of emphasis
or subordination. He is still far from the thoroughgoing luminism of his
last years.

Before dealing with the great masterpiece of Velazquez's maturity, the
Surrender at Breda, a word on the portraits. One of his earliest
and best portraits of children is Prince Balthasar Carlos and his Dwarf,
Boston. The general stately setting is one that Titian would have approved,
but Titian would not have given the floor its rise in perspective, thus
throwing the dwarf forward and lower. This acceptance of the actual perspective
distinguishes most of the full-length portraits. It gives liveliness to
the stance of the figures. The details of the little prince's costume
are touched in with snap and precision. His head is constructed with infinitesimal
gradations of blond tones, contrasting with the heavy shadow employed
in constructing the heavy, moody face of the dwarf. This difference of
treatment brings out the physical frailty of the ailing and short-lived
little prince. His fixed, somewhat distrustful eyes singularly hold the
attention. The total feeling is of rectitude, permanence and completeness,
as if everything had been said that needs to be said, and not a syllable
more. The date is just after the Italian journey, 1631.

Merely mentioning a number of indoor portraits of members of the royal
family, which differ from those of the second period chiefly in greater
ease of workmanship, we may pass to the portrait of Velazquez's friend,
the sculptor Montanes, 1637, Madrid. At first sight it is merely
such a wholesome, full-blooded portrait as the Venetians, for example,
Giovanni Moroni (1520-78) and Francesco Bassano the Elder (1475-1539),
produced in abundance. On closer inspection its superiority begins to
appear. The head is constructed in a larger and simpler fashion, with
modulations of fewer values, the definition of everything is adjusted
with regard to its distance from the face, and this principle reduces
the heroic head on which Montanes is working to a mere indication. A Venetian
painter would have represented it completely, to the detriment of pictorial
concentration. And while the Venetians, as born colourists, were adept
in the use of black, they rarely, if ever, created a black like that of
the sculptor's coat, so lively, so full of implicit colour. The sense
of a robust, self-confident nature, fit for great executive enterprises,
is vividly conveyed. Except in the treatment of the hair and beard there
is no apparent dexterity, just the plainest and most inevitable statement
of the visual facts. It is as if when painting a fellow artist Velazquez
worked with a kind of humility and homage. Montanes was of a character
to dispense with pyrotechnics.

Velazquez's unpretentious perfection in
these years may be more readily grasped in the small compass of the Head
of a Little Girl, in the Hispanic Society, New York. The processes
are entirely effaced. The fine, rounded face seems to bloom out of the
background in all its dignity and graciousness as a mass of coral detaches
itself from the seaweeds as your boat drifts over shallow waters. Of an
art that conceals its art, this is one of the finest examples.

Velazquez, on the contrary, employs every audacity of handling in the
outdoor portraits of these middle years, and logically, for the large
scale of the pictures required a broader treatment, and a method at once
more summary and emphatic was needed to make the forms and textures count
in that great leveler which Leonardo da Vinci called "the universal
light." The great pictures of this sort are all in the Prado at Madrid
- the standing portraits of Philip IV and Prince Balthasar Carlos with
their fowling pieces; the equestrian portraits of Count Olivares, the
king, and the prince. The brilliant handling of these pictures is so obvious,
their freshness and vitality so captivating, that they are equally popular
with the layman and the connoisseur. It seems as if the naturally clean
and silvery air had been especially washed for the reception of these
great personages.

Such details as purple scarves and gold
trimmings are quietly splendid, but without the sumptuousness a Venetian
painter would have given to such features. Here comparison of Titian's
magnificent Equestrian Charles V, in the same museum with Velazquez's
equestrian portraits, is most instructive. Titian insists more on his
few colour features; they have a value of contrast as against the prevailing
neutrals. In Velazquez the positive colour
is merely the high note in a chord, is not different from, but in the
general scale of, the prevailing neutrals. Again, because Titian keeps
the key low and maintains a merely decorative unity of tone, he is able
to detach his horse and rider without resort to such expedients as arbitrary
irradiations around the contours. This dodge, which Velazquez had outgrown
in his indoor portraits, is freely used in all these outdoor pictures.
He has not arrived at the point of making the natural light create the
sense of relief. But these illogical accents are in such decorative accord
with the generally brilliant handling, that only a detective eye ever
notices them.

In the three equestrian portraits, the landscape is treated with panoramic
breadth. The eye sweeps easily over the miles between a brown foreground
and the snow-covered crest of the Guadarrama mountains. In the Philip
and the Olivares a fine poplar, with leaves that seem to twinkle, brings
the sense of growth into the composition. In these landscapes there is
steady progress in breadth and energy. In the Olivares, painted before
1634, the landscape is somewhat sensationally cut up, and the billowing
clouds are theatrical. In the Philip IV, about two years later, all landscape
forms are simplified and tranquilized. The level clouds which veil the
sky echo the easy diagonal parallel lines of the landscape, the growing
poplar is set further away. All this centralizes the energetic elements
in the horse and rider. The dignity of the main theme is once for all
asserted in its own right, and needs no repetition or extraneous advertising.
The false accents of light along the contours used profusely in the Olivares
are here frugally employed. Velazquez is learning that subtler registration
of tone which gives assurance of form. The prevailing feeling of the picture
is less of force, though that was probably intended, than that of a reticent
dignity. The king, despite his cuirass and firmly held baton of a field
marshal - compare the way in which the king holds his baton, low, level
and inconspicuous, with the operatic way in which Olivares brandishes
his - the king seems rather a distinguished aristocrat than a resolute
military commander.

Interesting details tell us how the Philip IV was composed. A pair of
hind legs of the horse, which had been painted out, have faintly reappeared,
and strips about six inches wide have been added at the sides. It is evident
that the composition was not thought out in advance, but corrected as
the painting proceeded, and that even the size of the rectangle was not
pre-established. The painter began with the leading motive, which developed
its own accessories more or less unpredictably. A Florentine, who before
painting fixed his composition irrevocably in a cartoon, would have been
shocked at such a procedure. Even a Venetian, who had the habit of working
out the composition approximately in a sketch, would have thought Velazquez's
habit far too casual. It remained his practice to the end, as is shown
by seams and cuts in many of his canvases. It may have been inevitable
when the arrangement rested rather on very subtle relations and balances
of tone than on anything so concrete as linear pattern and equipoise of
mass and motion. with these factors known, the amount of space necessary
can be foretold; when the bounds are merely those emanating as tonality
and light from a central theme, no such pre-establishment of their extent
seems possible.

The popular favourite among the equestrian portraits will always be the
Prince Balthasar Carlos on the barrel-bellied pony that almost leaps out
of the frame, before a spacious panorama of riverland, mountains and clouds.
And for once the popular verdict seems sound. The picture carries the
whole freshness of a windy morning with it. While the confident boyish
face, and the large, fatal eyes of the lad soon to die are the centre
of attention, the eye readily grasps the snapping scarf, the bristling
tail and mane of the pony and the active, docile mass of the beast, who
rears as the little hand of his rider just feels the curb. I sometimes
think one must have been a horseman fully to appreciate these equestrian
portraits of Velazquez. So many painted horses are badly ridden. The diagonal
plunge of the pony is magnificently increased by the opposed diagonals
of the landscape. The landscape itself, with its sense of vastness, obtained
with a few carefully chosen features rendered almost in monochrome, has
scant analogies in European painting. One must seek them rather in the
early landscape painting of China and Japan. In none of his pictures has
Velazquez paid closer attention to linear pattern, and he does so without
abandoning his quest of the subtlest relations of tone. Thus the Balthasar
Carlos combines the old equipoised composition of the Renaissance with
that new principle of equipoised atmospheric relations which was his own
discovery.

All the portraits, indeed, virtually all
of the pictures of the twenty years between the two Italian journeys,
reveal the same compromise. In accepting the Venetian compositional scheme,
while rejecting the decorative splendor of Venice, these pictures are
not quite consistent. They look forward to a kind of picture which should
have the strongest appeal, while dispensing both with the established
compositional formulas and with the consecrated colour conventions.

The masterpiece of this period by common consent is the Surrender of
Breda, better known from its mass of lances against the sky as Las
Lanzas. It was finished about 1635, as one of thirteen examples of
mural painting for a hall in the
new palace of Buen Retiro, and this explains an arrangement which virtually
omits the middle distance. What was to count decoratively at distant view
was the picturesque mass of the group as a whole, such contrasting elements
as the horse seen from behind, and a wide prospect of smoking, level country
glimpsed over the heads of the soldiers or between the uncertainly held
pikes of the defeated Hollanders and the rigid palisade of the lances
of the victorious Spaniards. And all this was to serve merely as a sort
of elaborate margin for the central feature - a magnanimous victor declining
to humiliate a beaten foe, rather greeting him as an honoured brother
in arms.

This great invention really makes the picture.
You could imagine these two central figures cut out and the loss in the
marginal features would be surprisingly small. But a given space had to
be covered, and the extensions of the theme are appropriate. In 1629 Velazquez
had made the considerable voyage from Barcelona to Genoa in Spinola's
train, and doubtless his chivalric courtesy in this picture corresponds
to Velazquez's personal estimate of the man. Such an invention should
dispel the legend that Velazquez was a frigid character, a mere technician.
No frigid person imagined this meeting of the Marquis of Spinola and Justin
of Nassau.

Even the best reproductions misrepresent Las Lanzas, push the figures
too far into the foreground, diminish the expanse of the landscape, and
the canopying effect of the marbled sky. But even in a mediocre reproduction
the dignity and completeness of this greatest of military pictures is
apparent. In order to harmonize with the other battle pieces in Buen Retiro,
Velazquez had to follow what we have called the Venetian manner of composition,
as usual studying the actual illumination more closely than the Venetians
ever did. The picture was finished about 1635, ten years after the event
commemorated. Spinola must have regarded it with mixed feelings, and with
a retrospective consolation, for meanwhile his battalions, victorious
in the Netherlands, had been shattered in France before the army of the
Great Conde. Having himself tasted the bitterness of defeat, it must have
pleased him to be immortalized as softening the defeat of a gallant foe.

As if to show that he could still paint a conventional subject in a conventional
way, when Velazquez was commanded, about 1641, to paint a Coronation
of the Virgin for the queen's oratory, he produced a picture that
at first sight might have been made a century earlier, in, say, Brescia.
Even the Madonna is a type. Velazquez repeats the formal symmetry of the
Renaissance in the composition, and avoids baroque extravagance where
it would have been effective, in the clouds and draperies. As his repudiation
of the baroque, this picture is chiefly significant.

In January, 1649, Velazquez sailed for Italy, and made his way as quickly
as possible to Venice. This time he came not as a student, but as a master,
with a commission to buy pictures and engage decorators for the king's
new palace. He bought chiefly the Venetians, notably Tintoretto's sketch
for the Paradise. Passing to Rome, he was well received by such leading
artists as Bernini, Poussin and Salvator Rosa
(1615-73). Salvator questioned him as to his favourite Italian painters
and heard with amazement that Raphael did not
please Velazquez at all. The anecdote is interesting as showing a blind
spot in Velazquez's taste, and as showing that, even for the romantic
and ruffianly Salvator, Raphael's pre-eminence was axiomatic.

From Pope Innocent X came an unexpected
and, since Velazquez was very busy, possibly unwelcome command for a portrait.
To get his hand in, Velazquez painted the head of his mulatto assistant,
Pareja, and then began the astounding Portrait of Pope Innocent
X (c.1650, Doria Pamphilj
Gallery, Rome), which Sir Joshua Reynolds was later to call the finest
picture in Rome. Perhaps no other portrait in the world grips so promptly
and holds so strongly every sort of beholder. Why? Not for the usual reason
of charm. The reds and whites in which it is painted are rather strident
than harmonious; the man himself, repellent. There he sits eternally,
sensual without geniality, choleric yet sly, and he is God's vice-regent
on earth. I suppose it may be this disparity between the gross male and
his sacred office that constitutes the irony of the presentation and much
of its effect, yet I doubt if such considerations were in Velazquez's
consciousness in the few breathless hours in which he made mere paint
strokes give the look of the man before him. While the figure is admirably
set in the frame in the Venetian fashion, no one would think of it as
decorative or composed. The greatness of the work grows out of the sinister
interest of the subject matter. Everything is rather discovered afresh
than made after any pre-existing pattern. So this great portrait is at
once Velazquez's highest triumph in what we may call his conservative
vein, and also the prelude to the unprecedented masterpieces of his remaining
years.

Final Years - Las Meninas and The Tapestry
Weaver (Las Hilanderas)

Velazquez stayed so long in Italy that the Spanish king, who valued his
company as much as his services, repeatedly called him, and got him back
in June of 1651, after an absence of more than two years. During this
period Velazquez was too busy to do much painting. We may imagine him
resting up and thinking much, and more or less disinterestedly training
his eye to finer observation. The king appointed him marshal of the palace,
which put him in charge of ceremonies, entertainments, of the higher royal
housekeeping generally. It was a position that required tact and took
much time. Knighthood promptly followed this honour. The king had remarried,
and the entertainments for Maria Anna of Austria taxed the marshal's time
and energy. Often he must have looked at two little sketches of the Villa
Medici which he had brought back from Rome, and perhaps sighed when he
thought how difficult it was to find time to realize what these modest
studies foreshadowed.

These little sketches, at Madrid, simply
show that charming concord of formal planting and formal architecture
which still makes the Villa Medici one of the most delightful garden spots
in the world. What composition there is, is simply that of the architectural
features in the foreground; the rest is tall cypresses melting into the
sky, clipped hedges, the tops of which draw down the light. There is no
great variety or force of colour, but the neutral grey, green and brown
fully express the play of the universal light about the forms. In landscape
nothing similar had been done, nor was this achievement to be equalled
until nearly two centuries later.

The prophecy of Velazquez's fourth and final manner is found in certain
character studies and portraits of court fools and dwarfs painted well
before the second Italian journey. In these records of social nobodies
Velazquez was perfectly free to experiment. What he was seeking is clearly
shown in the full-length portraits of two vagabonds, Madrid, posing as
the philosopher, Menippus, and the fabulist, Aesop. These
figures, which nearly fill the space and are presented without compositional
accessories, are more impressive than the royal portraits of the same
date. The contrast in handling is instructive. The constructional planes
of the Aesop are strongly and crisply asserted. It is the technique
that Manet will later repeat with great mastery. The Menippus seems
to be merely a varying luminous surface which becomes face, features,
body, drapery, by some magical modulation of tone and light. One can hardly
speak of workmanship. The brush simply bestows the light that is necessary
to create the form. These pictures are usually dated about 1640.

This inscrutable technique reappears in several of those most pathetic
portraits of dwarfs, notably in the lolling idiot, El Prima, and
in the Idiot of Coria, both of about 1647, and at Madrid. The head
and the lace ruff of the Idiot are documentary for the new style.
There are no linear accents, really no edges, no sense of linear pattern,
simply a rounding of variously illuminated forms in space. Velazquez has
arrived at a complete synthesis, has found equivalents in colour pigments
for those subtle modulations of lighter or darker tones which the eye
reports to the mind and the mind interprets as forms.

On his return from Italy in 1651 Velazquez pursues a twofold course. The
royal portraits are still conceived in the Venetian manner, but are brushed
with an ever-increasing dexterity which is, after all, devoted to simple
truth-telling. Notable among the royal portraits are that of the Infanta
Maria Teresa, Vienna, all muted silver about the proud, warm face; the
adorable half-length, unhappily defaced by a big inscription, of the Infanta
Marguerite, Paris; and, perhaps most brilliant of all the royal portraits,
that of the Infanta Marguerite, now grown into her 'teens, at Madrid.
In her absurdly stiff and hoop-skirted costume she becomes a princess
of a luminous fairyland, in which the brush strokes that create the curtain
and describe the cherry-red ribbon laced through her silvery frock are
beyond their connotation a circumambient glory of light and colour. It
is one of the few official Velazquezes that seem to be joyously executed,
as if he had emerged from long effort into a realm of effortless and rapturous
creation. It was painted in 1658, a little before the master's death.

The Venus and Cupid, London, was
painted about 1657. Unusually, it seems to be a badly over-rated picture,
and since it is also a very famous picture, this view of it may be unpopular.
Intrinsically, it is just an academy, an alert, slender female nude seen
from behind. The method of construction is, for the moment, strangely
linear. Naturally so, for the supple line that runs the length from the
nape of the neck to the relaxed instep has interested Velazquez. One wishes
he had left it as an academy with few accessories, for the accessories
which make a nude into a Venus are ill-chosen and untelling. The stuffy
draperies serve no compositional purpose; the enlarged reflection of the
face in the mirror is obtrusive and confusing, the plump, well-conditioned
Cupid who holds the mirror is extraneous and silly. In short, the picture
should either have been more naturalistic or of a more studied conventionality.
Even granting the beautiful painting of the nude, the picture compares
badly with the honest naturalism
of Courbet and Manet in this vein, as it does with the provocative sensualism
of Goya's Maya, or the artificial grandeur of Titian's Venus and Danae.

One should perhaps regard Velazquez's Venus
as a very able but un-successful attempt to dispute Titian's inalienable
laurels. Velazquez, whose intelligence was probably as narrow as it was
acute, had not learned that there is no equivalence between a naked woman
and a nude Venus.

At about fifty-seven Velazquez painted the two pictures, Las Meninas
(1656, Prado, Museum), and the Tapestry Weavers (Las Hilanderas)
(1659, Prado), which most fully expressed his lifelong ardor of research.
For nearly a century they have been scrutinized and studied by ambitious
young painters, and, despite the present vogue of anti-Impressionism,
it is hard to foresee a time when these pictures will lose importance.

Before considering them separately and carefully, a word on their composition.
In both cases it is entirely unprecedented. The pattern of Las Meninas
is fixed once and for all by the character of the interior - the repeated
rectangles of windows, a door, picture frames, the exposed edge of the
big canvas on which the artist is working. Within the big, shadowy, yet
luminous space which opens before you, the figure group forms at the level
of the heads an undulating curve which counters the general rectangularity.
The curve comes down and out to the picture plane in the head and body
of the fine hound at the right.

Las Hilanderas offers a composition
of quite a different sort. You look through a larger, dusky world, animated
by the magnificent gesture and pose of the woman reeling yarn, through
an arch into a world higher up and quivering with light, in which courtly
women view a tapestry, their figures just distinguishable from its woven
figures. It is a kind of picture within a picture - a fairyland created
by the skillful work of the toilers seen in the nearer space. Strangely enough, within a dozen years
or so the finest eye among Dutch painters, that of Jan
Vermeer, was to make compositions of much this sort, and, of course,
without knowledge of these masterpieces of Velazquez. But Vermeer was
to conduct his experiment on a small scale. It is doubtful if he could
have carried it off on the scale of life. It needed the eye and hand of
a Velazquez to heroize what are essentially genre subjects.

In viewing Las Meninas one is first
aware of the vast, dimly lighted space, of which the figures seem a sort
of incident. Yet when you consider the group as such, it expresses a singularly
tense solicitude for the lovely child in the centre, a devotion which
has almost a religious character, like that of the saints in some Italian
Adoration of the Virgin.

Perhaps the appeal of Las Meninas is chiefly technical. But here we should
realize that the technique is merely the expression of a noble and gracious
way of seeing. For the value of any picture is simply that it enables
a sensitive beholder to experience the disciplined rapture of thc artist's
creative act. Everything depends on the fineness and breadth of the artist's
vision. If he sees in a small and mean way, his king, his saint, his Olympian
deity will have a small and mean effect. If he sees in a large and generous
way, his beggar will have grandeur. Very rightly Delacroix insisted that
a ragged Jew by Rembrandt could be as sublime
as a Sibyl by Michelangelo.

This largeness of vision develops the appropriate technical means. The
size of the picture is very carefully adjusted to the natural angle of
vision. The natural spaciousness is maintained at all sacrifice. The play
of the light in space is fastidiously registered. And all these factors
in simple representation become as well elements in decorative effect.
In short, Velazquez decorates a space by the use of tone more than any
painter before him. It is an unusual means of decoration. The eye trained
to swirling lines and balanced areas of positive colour easily misses
it. And because most of us see in a small way, it is easy to find Velazquez's
airy spaciousness empty and uninteresting. His pictures, then, are an
invitation and a challenge to see largely.

As for the magic of his tonalities, we can study his palette as he paints
in Las Meninas. It contains only black, white and red. Yet the picture
gives the sense of great variety and richness of colour. All these technical
values were first values of contemplation to Velazquez, and may be values
of contemplation to us.

At first sight Las Hilanderas has a stranger beauty. Its values
are those of action deeply contemplated. On closer study, the picture
stands less apart than Las Meninas, falls more in line with established
attractions, recalls, say, the athletic romanticism of Tintoretto.
The picture was painted in 1657, a year after Las Meninas. It is
as if Velazquez, having created a masterpiece along completely unprecedented
lines, wished to show that he could create a striking novelty while working
under established procedures. Except the inner room, the fantastic picture
within the picture, there is little that would have struck Tintoretto
and his followers as new or odd. Even the greater subtlety of construction
would have been approved by a Fetti or a Strozzi.

The composition may be regarded as a sort of emanation from the superbly
posed head, back and arm of the spinner at the right, just as the light
from her flesh and her white basque seems to pervade the space in radiating
diminuendo. The theme, in a narrative sense, is artistic creation in two
aspects - that of the worker and that of the beholder. Velazquez asserts
the grandeur of the mere work, and suggests the joy that work makes possible.
The picture is more brilliantly handled than Las Meninas, with
larger sweeps of the brush and heavier applications of pigment. Again
one feels Velazquez had his favourite Venetian, Tintoretto, in mind.

The composition is exceptional in Velazquez in observing central symmetry
- a formality well disguised by the variety, energy and absence of symmetry
in the balanced elements. The ladder that catches the light alongside
the portal is an indispensable element in composition. Without it the
central symmetry would be too apparent. Again, it required utmost tact
to give the courtly scene in the inner room its fairy charm without sacrificing
its reality. Perhaps the larger motive of the picture is that of the two
phases of the work of art, creation and appreciation, the work of creation
is the more real and significant. Such a reading at least corresponds
to the emphasis which Velazquez has given to the two spaces which constitute
this great picture.

As between these two pictures, in keeping with its more lively colour
scheme, the composition lines of the Weavers flow more sinuously
and harmoniously than the rigid forms of Las Meninas, and the masses
twine and interweave in a more rhythmic and balanced pattern. Las Meninas
is graver, nobler and more imposing, also less expected, less formal,
and less aided by artificial elegancies of arrangement. Las Hilanderas
is more supple and insinuating in its grace of pattern, more enchanting
and varied in its treatment of colour and detail.

Death and Legacy

In June of 1660 they married the Infanta
Maria Teresa to the young King of France, Louis XIV. The ceremony, which
was held on the Isle of Pheasants, in the river dividing France from Spain,
had to be planned by Velazquez in his role as marshal of the castle, and
apparently over-taxed his resources, for on his return to Madrid he was
stricken with a violent intermittent fever, and a little past midsummer
he died. He had won generous acclaim from fellow artists, but apparently
the laity regarded him simply as one more portrait painter. His pupil,
Esteban Murillo, was far more widely known and admired until about seventy
years ago. In the eighteenth century the magnificent Velazquezes owned
by the king of France were hung, not in the public halls, but in the bathrooms.
Similarly, a great American art patron of recent times relegated the Cezannes
to the servants' quarters. The critical rehabilitation of Velazquez came
with Impressionism,
the ancestor and incomparable model for which he obviously was. Now that
Impressionism itself is everywhere in retreat, one would expect a corresponding
abatement of Velazquez's fame. But nothing of the sort seems to be happening,
which is perhaps a sign that his Impressionism is, after all, merely one
of many capacities that constitute his greatness.